Keeping the Green - Fire and Cooking

Keeping the Green - Fire and Cooking

By Harman Maurus - 3E 430

For the Boiche of Valenwood, no law is more sacred than the Green Pact. The strictures of this sacred compact between the Bosmer and their forest god, Y'ffre, govern every aspect of Bosmeri life. The most important of these by far forbids the Bosmer to harm the plant life of their forest home, precluding the use of the plant products on which our lives so often depend. This sacred law has forced the Bosmer to develop an unrivaled ingenuity in finding Pact-compliant alternatives to plant matter in all fields.

The most obvious of these is the carnivorous Bosmeri diet. But beyond this, with no wood for the fire, how are the Boiche to cook the fruits of their hunts? It is too often assumed that they simply subsist on a diet of raw flesh, and while this is true of certain deep-woods tribes, the vast majority of Bosmer enjoy a carnivorous cuisine of fascinating variety and complexity.

Depending on the resources available, several clans burn coal or peat soil on their fires. However, in areas where coal and peat are not in abundance, or are not accessible without unacceptable deforestation, yet more creative methods are necessary. Perhaps the most creative, but in many ways the most obvious, is the surprising use of magic.

Many tribes entrust the cooking of their meat to individuals known as "Meat Mages"*, although squeamishly polite scholars often use softer terms. These Meat Mages are highly specialised practitioners of what Imperial wizards would categorise as destruction magic. These are no apprentice battlemages, however; their skills are not by any means limited to the indiscriminate spraying of flame. Indeed the Meat Mages are capable of a degree of delicacy and precision quite unparalleled among scholastic mages. In the pursuit of culinary excellence, they apply the perfect heat, size, duration, and direction of flame. Indeed, while the School of Destruction might group them in common, rest assured that a Bosmeri Meat Mage carefully singeing to perfection a haunch of venison can in no way be compared to even the most talented of battlemages scorching his foes.

So important is the hunt, meat, and meal to clan life among the Bosmer that the Meat Mage might be counted alongside elders, healers, and Storytellers among the village's most prominent figures. When the hunters of the clan return triumphant, it is to the Meat Mage they will bring their choicest cuts. It is then the privilege of hunter and mage that the cut will be prepared with all the prodigious skill of the latter.

Among city-dwelling Bosmer, the Meat Mage has, as with so many aspects of traditional tribal life, been domesticated to an extent. In the urban centres of Valenwood, Meat Mages are often employed by eateries and inns without coal of peat in much the fashion of a skilled chef in other provinces. Other, more traditional Meat Mages operate their own premises, where townsfolk may have their meat prepared and where hunters may gather after their successful sorties to share stories and their choice cuts, just as in the village.

The Meat Mages are a fascinating expression of how unique needs can lead to unique skills. The Green Pact challenges the Bosmer in innumerable ways, but they prove consistently able to survive and thrive within the framework of the Green Pact, in accordance with the enigmatic wishes of their deities.

*Translating Bosmeris is a necessarily inexact art as double-meanings and conflations abound. This translation in particular is a difficult one, as both "meat" and "mage" occupy enormous and hazy semantic fields. Dependent on dialect and context, "meat" might instead be translated as "flesh", "body", "system", or even "world", while "mage" might mean also "artist", "craftsmer", "thinker", or any number of only loosely-connected words. Thus the term for "Meat Mage" might in different tribes or regions describe also a healer or chirurgeon, a tatoo artist, even a philosopher or alterationist.